Tokenization isn’t representation. It’s exploitation.

When someone says, “I know a Jew,” or “My Jewish friend agrees,” they’re often treating one person as a stand-in for an entire people.

A token is valued not for their individuality, but for the cover they provide:

“See? A Jew agrees with me, so I can’t be prejudiced.”

No Jew was elected to speak for 15 million others.

Listen to Jewish voices. Don’t weaponize one against the rest.

I don’t have the fortitude to check out the comments today, but the post is here.

Eliya

I met Ziv in 2011 while growing up near Tel Aviv. We were both 14 and I saw her crying because her boyfriend had left her. Trying to help, I said, “Don’t cry. You are young, pretty and you will have a good life ahead of you.” She eventually messaged me on Instagram and we started hanging out together. I learnt quickly that she has the most beautiful soul and her love for me was like nothing I had ever experienced. Later we moved in together and we were together every day until October 7, 2023.

Part of my job was organising festivals and we spent many weekends with our friends, listening to music, drinking and having fun. The Nova festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel, was something we were all looking forward to. Even after we saw the missiles in the sky that day, we thought, “Ah, this is Israel. It is a normal day.” So we carried on dancing. It was only when I got a call from my aunt, who was also at the festival, that we realised something was not right. She was screaming, saying that someone in her car had been shot. I said to Ziv, “We should get out of here.”

We drove with Ziv’s nephew and his girlfriend, heading for the main road, but there was a police roadblock. We turned the car around and drove maybe five minutes until we saw a bomb shelter — a common sight near the border. More people joined us in the shelter, but we were all talking and joking. Although it was scary, we had seen it before.

Then suddenly the terrorists were outside the shelter and they were going to kill us. A grenade rolled into the shelter and exploded. Another grenade and we are fighting, picking up the grenades and throwing them out of the door. It was like this for 40 minutes until the terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade.

I don’t know how, but my mind was still working. Ziv fainted and I knew the only chance to save her was to bury her underneath the dead bodies. Two of those bodies were her nephew and his girlfriend.

The bullets were still coming into the shelter and I was shot in the leg, but then I was dragged out and loaded onto a truck. The last thing I saw was a terrorist pointing his gun into the shelter and firing a hundred bullets. I was sure Ziv was dead.

I was driven to Gaza and thousands of people were on the streets celebrating. I was more scared of these people than I was of the terrorists. The terrorists wanted to keep me alive, a hostage for negotiation. Those ordinary people wanted to kill me. They wanted the respect that would come from killing a Jew.

I was held for 505 days. In the tunnels was the worst — no light, no sleep, beatings, being stripped naked so they could laugh at us, no food, no water. There was a wonderful day when we realised we were so far underground that there was damp on the walls. We would lick the walls. At least we had a drop of water. I put my trust in God. I knew they would not break me.

The days blurred into one, but when we heard a rumour that Donald Trump had been elected it made my group of four hostages very excited. Two weeks later our captors told us three of us would be released. Just three, not four. I was lucky enough to be one of them but knowing one of us was still in captivity filled me with guilt. Alon Ohel was freed eight months later.

Then I saw my family. And Ziv. She was alive. It wasn’t real, but it was. Of course then I found out what had been happening in the world. The marches celebrating the murders and rapes, babies being slaughtered. The only reason people can mock is because we are Jewish. If it happened to other people they wouldn’t.

Even after I was released I didn’t allow myself to continue with life. How could I see a doctor or start my therapy when the other hostages weren’t free? The 20 remaining living hostages were released last October.

It has taken a long time but Ziv and I now try to think about the future. I bought an engagement ring before October 7 and have now had the chance to propose. We will marry this summer and build a family with many children in Israel, in the land where they tried to kill us. For me, that’s the biggest victory of all.

Ziv

The bomb shelter we were in on that day in 2023 — on Route 232 near the Kibbutz Re’im — is now known as the shelter of death. The first grenade exploded and the sound, the smell, the dead bodies… not even bodies, arms and legs and blood. I was scared like I have never been scared before. I peed myself three or four times.

The last thing I remember is holding Eliya’s hand and him covering me with dead bodies. I think I heard him scream, saying he’d been shot. Then one of the terrorists began shooting into the shelter — a machinegun. So many bullets. I could feel them hitting the bodies on top of me — thum-thum-thum — making the bodies shudder and move. And then nothing.

I woke up at 11am and the attack had started at eight. There was me and six other survivors in the shelter, and we had no idea what was going to happen. Would the terrorists come back? We sat with our dead friends for seven hours until we were rescued and taken to a hospital. I tried to call my sisters and they said they had seen a picture of Eliya. I thought they were lying, trying to make me happy, but then I saw the picture on the news. He was alive but he was in Gaza — a hostage.

I cried myself to sleep every night but each morning I would tell myself that I would make sure Eliya came home. I was part of the delegations travelling around the world, telling people about October 7. When he was finally released and I saw him again, after 16 months, he was so thin, my Eliya, and like a ghost.

When I was a child I heard people talk about the Holocaust and how much people hated Jews, but I thought that people had changed. Then I saw marches all over Europe, defending what had happened. People would stop me in the street and say Hamas is not a terrorist group, they are fighting for human rights.

Of the people who were murdered, we knew 48 of them. [Official figures put the death toll of the October 7 attacks at 1,200.] My nephew and his girlfriend are gone. I suffer from PTSD and still have nightmares. When I tried on my wedding dress, there was nothing, no happy tears. October 7 changed us, it changed everything, but we have hope. Our wedding is going to be our moment. It is our present from God.

It's stupid conceptually, but do you know who proves it wrong?

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Since the turd got back in office aid to Ukraine has been slashed

And in the last few months Ukraine has made russia its bitch

Ukraine did not collapse as trump his cronies and putin bet it would, they adapted, they found new partners, relied on their own know how, embraced the fact that no US aid means less leverage and more freedom to strike russia as they please

In April 1948, weeks before Israel's independence, 22-year-old Robert F. Kennedy traveled through Mandatory Palestine & saw Jews fighting for their right to live and have a state & Arabs calling for jihad against the Jews and to prevent a Jewish state.

This day, his dispatch was published in the Boston Post:

The Arabs declared openly:

“We shall bring Moslem brigades from Pakistan, we shall lead a religious crusade for all loyal followers of Mohammed … Whether it takes three months, three years, or 30, we will carry on the fight. Palestine will be Arab. We shall accept no compromise.”

The Jews, RFK wrote, were “fighting for their very lives … with their backs to the sea” and “101 percent morale.”

Most importantly, he captured the irreconcilable core of the conflict:

“The Jews want a homeland of their own. That to them is the sole issue.

The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist.”

This was written before modern Israel existed in any borders.

The conflict was never primarily about borders, refugees, or “the occupation.”

It was about one side demanding a sovereign Jewish state — and the other side’s fundamental, non-negotiable principle being that no such state could ever be allowed to exist.

A 22-year-old Bobby Kennedy saw the truth with brutal clarity in real time.

The world still refuses to see it today.

They call us settlers in the land that gave us our name. The word “Jew” comes directly from Judea. The Hebrew Yehudi, a person from Yehudah, passed into Greek as Ioudaios, into Latin as Iudaeus, through Old French as Giu, and into Middle English as Iew. Britannica states it plainly: the term Jew is derived through Latin and Greek from the Hebrew word for a person from Judea. The land named the people.  The people never fully left. And two thousand years later, now that we are coming home, the world calls us settlers with a word that literally means we are from here. Make it make sense.